Suggestions that Republicans cease noting the obvious about Kamala Harris being the DEI candidate for president are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the American electorate.
2037 search results for: Supreme%252525252BCourt
Can a Pope Change Moral Truth?
That joking retort we heard as children, “Is the pope Catholic?” is starting to look like a serious question. Asked five years ago about a “gay lobby” in the Vatican, Pope Francis responded, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” As judgment was thought to...
The International Criminal Court: Clinton’s Frankenstein’s Monster
For years, the Clinton-Gore administration has been in the forefront of efforts to create international judicial bodies—such as the Yugoslav war-crimes “tribunal” at The Hague—that could be used as auxiliary tools of diplomatic decisionmaking in Washington. Madeleine Albright liked the façade of legality that could be invoked to justify their policies. All along, of course,...
Italy’s Push for Euthanasia: An End to “Pointless Suffering”
Thanks, in part, to the presence of the Roman Catholic Church, Italy has remained one of the least secularized countries in the European Union. At present, however, the Italian government, led by Prime Minister Romano Prodi, seems hellbent on irking the Catholic Church with its legislative initiatives, including its attempt to legalize homosexual unions and...
The Other Lindbergh
While the most famous member of the Lindbergh clan is undoubtedly the aviator and World War II-era isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the qualities for which he won renown—his courage, his Scandinavian severity, his willingness to stand against the tide of popular opinion, his dislike of cities and the elites they spawned, and (most of...
Nothing’s Easy About Israel
Such was my pro-Israel ardor back in 1967, I actually put my name down as a volunteer soldier in the Six-Day War. I was living in Paris, and I was asked by the recruiter if I were Jewish. When I answered in the negative, he jumped up and shook my hand. As everyone knows, my...
Affirmative Action’s Destructive Force: An Interview With Amy Wax
Amy Wax talks about issues of race, merit, intelligence, and virtue as well as the discriminatory effects of Affirmative Action.
On Ludwig von Mises
Thomas Fleming’s criticism of Ludwig von Mises and his student, Friedrich von Hayek (“Abuse Your Illusions,” Perspective, January), overlooks or misinterprets major contributions of both. In Socialism (1922), Mises was the first economist to show the unworkability of socialist systems. He based his analysis on the impossibility of establishing a price structure for the various...
Delightful Murders and Sheer Torture
While “off Broadway” is often the destination for the worst sort of stage-direction anarcho-anachronism, with Othello in spaceships and all-lesbian versions of Macbeth, it may surprise the non-New Yorker to learn that it is often the place to discover classic drama played absolutely straight (in all senses) and flawlessly acted. Such was the case recently...
Illusion and Reality, Then and Now
Years ago—so long ago indeed that I hesitate to record the date—a wise lady of Hungarian origin said to me in Vienna: “Oh, to be able to see Venice again for the first time!” It was one of those casual remarks which, behind the smiling mask of a truism, reveals a hidden, monitory depth. Contrary...
Magna Mater, Full of Grace!
“Nature, which is the time-vesture of God and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.” —Thomas Carlyle I don’t believe I realized, until I began reading up on the subject of Deep Ecology, how far the rot of despair and self-loathing has penetrated the Western world. Multiculturalism as an expression of the...
Dutch Euthanasia Case Serves as Harbinger
In 2002 the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia, formalizing what had been tolerated by the government for several decades prior. Today, however, the Dutch practice of euthanasia is arguably less settled legally than ever before. In September, a doctor was found not guilty of breaking the law after administering...
A Masque of State–and Its Parody
“Soft Power” is real power. The State Banquet at Buckingham Palace earlier this month showed royals and the President at their best, with an unstated but perfectly clear implication: no other country can do this. It were well to keep on good terms with the people who can put on a show like this. Everyone was at the top of their form: Trump behaved impeccably, and...
The Craft of Art
If in political and social terms the diminishing role of the aristocracy in Europe was, in the historian’s view, inevitable, in cultural terms its dissipation was not really felt until the turn of the century. Indeed, the intellectual history of our time is a record of careless exploitation and ruthless expropriation of what had once...
The Perils of Greatness
The thing about Lyndon Johnson—and you may be sure I kept a close adolescent eye on him while he was one of my two U.S. senators—was that he knew what he was doing. There was more to it even than that. He knew how to get things done. The faint breezes from the ’50s...
Now Is Not the Time for Indifference
Freedom now hangs in the balance in America. Staying alert and knowing what’s at stake are key in this fight for liberty.
Knights of the Invisible Empire
Back in the days when Southern merchants had to take the Ku Klux Klan seriously, the knights of the Invisible Empire liked to play a neat little trick on a store owner who had strayed too far from the path of racial rectitude the secret society demanded of him. Several Klansmen in plain clothes would...
Science and Democracy
A virtue of America’s quadrennial election cycle is its success in revealing and giving form to whatever popular malaise has set in over the past four years, whether the results of the elections themselves address the disorder or not, and occasionally in raising real issues, even if only by implication. In this respect, the presidential...
Will JFK’s Party Become Sanders’ Party?
Sen. Bernie Sanders may be on the cusp of both capturing the Democratic nomination and transforming his party as dramatically as President Donald Trump captured and remade the Republican Party. After his sweep of the Nevada caucuses, following popular vote victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has the enthusiasm and the momentum, as the...
Conservative Credo IV: The Abortion Debate
The Abortion Debate In the 20th century the most powerful and difficult transitions in human life have been turned into political war zones in which the different sides routinely invoke the power of government to establish and enforce their points of view. Few debates have been so heated as those involving the decision to terminate...
Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration On the Dignity Of Man
I once read that Abdala the Muslim, when asked what was most worthy of awe and wonder in this theater of the world, answered, “There is nothing to see more wonderful than man!” Hermes Trismegistus concurs with this opinion: “A great miracle, Asclepius, is man!” However, when I began to consider the reasons for these opinions,...
Nil and Void: Beckett’s Last Gasp
During the ongoing, international celebration of Samuel Beckett’s 80th birthday, which commenced last spring, much is being said, written, and done to reiterate unequivocally his position as the preeminent playwright of our century. There is no debate, really, so much as an affirmation and an exploration of his unquestioned significance. The irony, of course, is...
MODI ANTE PORTAS
Two important recent events – Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in India last week and the massive energy and trade agreement which Russia and China signed in Beijing on Wednesday – have the potential to alter Asia’s strategic landscape. Modi is an assertive politician unafraid to take risks, a market-oriented reformer, but also a Hindu nationalist....
Our Global Parents
Americans who hoped that the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child would be stuffed in a drawer with its predecessor, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, got a jolt in February when Mrs. Clinton announced (at the funeral of UNICEF director James Grant) that the Convention...
A Man of Inaction
In 1912, at dusk walking home, Henry Adams spotted something he thought to be a hippopotamus in the nation’s capital. As he drew nearer he saw it was President Taft. He gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble to pieces than ever . . . but what struck me most was the...
The Neo-Ottoman Empire
Contrary to Washington’s official rhetoric, the U.S. government is an ally, not an opponent, of Islamic extremism—a foe, not a defender, of Western civilization. Not since the Turkish siege of Vienna (1526) has Europe faced the threat of a Muslim occupation of significant portions of the continent; it does so now because of the foreign...
Reaping the Red’s Harvest
Diane Johnson: Dashiell Hammett: A Life; Random House; New York. Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that...
Cajuns Uncaged
While many modern historians, liberal politicians, and media elites would like to think that the very concept of “state sovereignty” died when Robert E. Lee offered his sword to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the people of one state recently gave state sovereignty a ringing endorsement at the ballot box....
Flags as Symbols
At the end of the 60’s, the Establishment began a deliberate campaign to destroy a number of American symbols it considered inimical to black welfare. That these symbols—such as the various flags of the Confederate States of America and the song “Dixie”—are revered by a large section of our country for reasons not connected with...
The Heart’s Geography
I took out the atlas the other day to figure out the routes of the voyagers retraced by Jean Raspail on his first trip to the United States. In the event, it proved impossible to plot a French expedition on a modern map of the United States. Maps are political abstractions. They encourage us to...
Kamala Harris Is a Race Hustler
A Harris presidency would send white men to the back of the line and ignite racial animus.
Watch This Space
That I could order my Apple Watch Sport from my iPhone while walking down the Corso Italia in Milan, and pay for it on the phone with just the touch of my thumb, is as much of a technological marvel as the Watch itself. With the exception of my thumbprint, not a single element in...
What Is America’s Cause in the World Today?
After being sworn in for a fourth term, Vladimir Putin departed the Kremlin for Annunciation Cathedral to receive the televised blessing of Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. The patriarch and his priests in sacred vestments surrounded Putin, who, standing alone, made the sign of the cross. Meanwhile, sacred vestments from the Sistine Chapel...
Robert Hanssen and the New Meaning of Treason
A year ago, Robert Philip Hanssen apparently felt the need to explain to the Russians his motives for supplying them with thousands of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents over the preceding decade and a half. The veteran FBI agent wrote them a letter, confessing that he is neither insanely brave, nor merely insane, but “insanely loyal”...
McDumb and Dumber
With more and better fast-food choices available than ever before, why do Americans continue to reward the mediocrity that is McDonald’s?
Studies in Tyranny
“Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered.” —Thomas Paine Nearly half a century after their destruction, Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler remain the objects of greater attention and hatred than do Stalin and his Soviet Union, although the extent of their crimes were similar and Stalin’s regime was in some ways the more complex and...
Buchanan at Bay
—”Imperialism is absolutely necessary to a people which desires spiritual as well as economic expansion. —Benito Mussolini America has survived, the Last and Only Superpower, while so many others have fallen by the wayside, their bones littering the road from empire: Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, and—closest to ourselves—a once-great Britain,...
What Atheists Know
“When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” —Flannery O’Connor In response to the charge of obsession with a “single issue,” pro-life activists contend that the abortion debate is really paradigmatic. As Joseph Sobran suggested...
Home Truths Again
“Liberalism” is the predominant form of snobbery in our time. A child molester is more likely to be a Democrat. A closeted homosexual is more likely to be a Republican. Nothing fails like success. But the opposite is not true—unless you have affirmative action. The USPS will discontinue Saturday mail in August. I can...
Dynastic Nostalgia
The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War by Luke A. Nichter Yale University Press 544 pp., $37.50 Even before the Kennedys took center stage in American mythology, Americans have had their share of legendary families, the decline and fall of which have been staples of both history and...
Biden’s Inexplicable Victory
Eleven months after the 2020 American presidential election, the official results remain so incongruous, they merit an empirical exegesis. The political establishment’s narrative is that Biden won an unexpectedly close race, and the outcome requires no further examination. Yet, Biden’s victory is so statistically suspicious, so riddled with ahistorical outcomes, that a detailed data examination...
On the Terror of Tribunals
Dr. Samuel Francis is an outstanding scholar, and he is usually right on target, but, speaking as an attorney, I’m afraid his article “Tribunals for Terror” (Views, March) is seriously flawed. Supporters have argued that tribunals are necessary, in part, to avoid potential intimidation of jurors. Dr. Francis, however, believes that Timothy McVeigh and the...
McGreevey’s Resignation
Jim McGreevey, who will be resigning as New Jersey’s governor on November 15, cares deeply for the people of the Garden State. (No, not the way you’re thinking!) Despite the admission on August 12 that he engaged in an extramarital relationship with a homosexual Israeli with possible ties to the Mossad—whom, early in his administration,...
The World Turned Upside Down
A truly startling, topsy-turvy race is being run for governor of Illinois. U.S. Representative Glenn Poshard, the Democrat, is embracing more conservative positions on culture and social policy; Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan, the Republican, is running away with much of the Democratic base, including gay-rights supporters. On trade, Poshard has supported a Buchananite...
Mr. Wilson’s Wars
“National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.” Woodrow Wilson’s words, recorded in the New York Times on February 12,1918, defined the 20th century and...
Remembering Warren G. Harding
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
Has Trump Found the Formula?
Stripped of its excesses, Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech contains all the ingredients of a campaign that can defeat Hillary Clinton this fall. Indeed, after the speech ended Clinton was suddenly defending the Clinton Foundation against the charge that it is a front for a racket for her family’s enrichment. The specific charges in Trump’s indictment...
âFamily Valuesâ: Illegal Aliens and Their Sex Crimes
Whatever President Bush says about the âfamily valuesâ of the growing horde of illegal Mexican immigrants, chilling newspaper accounts and cold data tell a different tale. On April 29, 2005, an illegal alien from Guatemala, Ronald Douglas Herrera Castellanos, was power washing a deck at the Nagle home in New City, New York. In her...
Public Opinion at the End of an Age
One symptom of decline and confusion at the end of an age is the prevalent misuse of terms, of designations that have been losing their meanings and are thus no longer real. One such term is public opinion. Used still by political thinkers, newspapers, articles, institutes, research centers, college and university courses and their professors,...
Music, Technology, and Psychological Warfare
“No change can be made in styles of music without affecting the most important conventions of society. So Damon declares and I agree.” —Plato, Republic The late Sam Shapiro used to tell a story about two Englishmen in China who wanted to demonstrate the superiority of their culture to one of the mandarins they had...